Fuzzy Smith...well I look forward to more data on this chunk of rock..

I've only just listened to the interview and I can only say it's been the most enjoyable evening I've had in a while.. It felt real good to hear Steve talking to you and share not only his scientific knowledge but his personal feelings and emotions about the latest achievements of our dear sister-rovers out there.

Thank you guys so much for having this conversation.

The reason I waited to listen to it 'till just now is been that I was looking forward to it so much and didn't want to have it ruined by 'noise' I made it a multimedia-experience by having Daniel's galleries and MRO-Victoria images on display to suck it all in visually as well. (better than a real good movie IMO).

I was surprised by Steve's mention that Victoria's investigation 'should' take years. It makes me believe he's fairly confident that funding will be assured as long as the vehicles are functioning properly

Y'all ready for another couple of years guys? I am!

However Steve's last words should be remembered at all times of course; "Don't ever take for granted..."Something unexpected is always possible to happen, I hope we can all remain thankful for all the combined effort this mission has had going for it if something unexpected would happen, causing either rover to die.

As Steve mentions, Victoria has been a fantasy from within the first 24 hours of the mission, they got there and everyone one them and every one of us dreamed of seeing it through Oppy's eyes and we are seeing it, in all its glory.. For the scientific part, I hope they get to have the answers they hope to get answered from Victoria, but, again, let's all be very gratefull just for having seen it so far..

Nico

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photographer, space imagery enthusiast, proud father and partner, and geek.

We didn't use a template before, we just did our own straight-up text posts into this thread. I agree that having a template would reduce the amount of reformatting Doug has to do on the final PDF assembly. The previous one can be found here.

D: Now you said that you’d like to know if you can leave or where you can leave. If you do leave Victoria, where next?SS: (laughs) Ha. Well …D: There’s not a great deal.SS: No there isn’t and what that says is that you should not leave Victoria without having done Victoria very well. We spent 21 months getting here. Since the day we landed, the dream goal of the mission was getting to the crater. I mean I remember, gosh it was the night we landed I think or within 24 hours of landing. We figured out more or less where we were, and then the guys at JPL found the “MOC strip” that had the landing site in it and printed it out. Enormous -- you know 3- 4 feet wide and 20 feet long or something. I remember unrolling it on a table in the operations area and Tim Parker, Mike Malin and a couple of other guys on the team were pointing. “Well OK here’s the little crater …”, we hadn’t named it Eagle Crater yet, “Here’s the little crater where we landed” and “Oh wow look at that crater over there!” and that was Endurance, and ”Boy it would be neat if we could get there”. We’re all clustered round looking at these little craters and thinking where we’re gonna go, and away down, 20 feet away at the other end of the table is this big honkin’ thing and it was just this fantasy, at the time. But we saw it the first night. You know, we knew that that thing was there. It was such an effort to get there and there’s so much scientific potential here and you have to go so far before you get to anything else. I mean the next crater onward from Vic that potentially offers more, scientifically, than Victoria does is I dunno 12, 15 kilometres away.D: To the ESE there’s a really large … For some reason the community have nicknamed it Ithaca. I don’t know why. I think that’s rude. (Laughs) But it’s a long way to the SE and you know how navigable is that terrain anyway? It took so long to get this far.SS: You’re talking about a distance from here to there that is more than the total distance traversed by the rover so far. So I do not look at that as a realistic goal. I still want to find an egress route. I just don’t like the idea of driving this thing in and not being able to get out. For example, we’re not gonna do 360 degrees around the rim of this thing before we go in because there’s so much that leads us to want to go in. Suppose we do 90 degrees or 120 degrees around the rim, then we find a good ingress point and in we go, we do some work in there and then we come up with some scientific question that is best answered by more imaging from the rim. I wanna be able to do that, you know. I don’t wanna just get stuck in that crater forever. So even if we don’t drive off to some distant crater, there are reasons to want to get out. But as to where you would go next, its hard to think that far ahead. I mean you’ve got to realize for example we certainly intend to go into this crater. If we go in and we lose a wheel, as has already happened on Spirit, that’s it. D: That’s it, you’re stuck.SS: You’re not coming out. I mean the demonstrated hill climbing ability with one bad wheel is about a seven or eight degree slope. And so if you drive in and you lose a wheel that’s it, you’re there forever. Just like Spirit’s never gonna climb McCool Hill. If we go into Victoria and we lose a wheel “whhittt” (neck chopping gesture) that’s it, game over.D: If you add the sol numbers together now its 2001.SS: Oh is it now. Today? Is that right? Yeah I guess that’s right.D: 990 and 1011.SS: Yeah that’s right. We just cracked 2000 sols. D: One thing I should touch on which we laughed about a year ago, the S1K bug.SS: Yeah. D: I never thought we’d actually have to worry about it but …SS: How did you come through the S1K bug? (Laughs) You must have folders that have ..D: I have folders to rename. I haven’t done it yet.SS: (Laughs) I think we came through it fine. D: The fabulous Midnight Mars Browser tool that many of us use to grab all the pictures, a little Java app that James made, that needed an S1K fix. The JPL image website, that needs an S1K fix. SS: Oh really?D: Yep. There’s something 1000 up way high. It’s reporting them incorrectly.SS: Uh oh. OK.D: The pancam tracking site, that needed a little fix because that was set to a thousand then was giving you one again. But how was it, I mean did you catch everything before you …SS: I think we caught everything. We tested it very thoroughly ahead of time. We saw this coming months and months and months in advance. A lot of software people went to work on it, made every change that it looked like we possibly needed to make and then we tested the hell out of it just like we test the hell out of everything before we actually use it. And so yeah, we’re very very thorough in our testing of it and I am not aware of any problems that we’ve had with S1K. I mean S1K for Spirit came during conjunction. And I was a little nervous about that but nah as far as I know it’s all been fine.D: Opportunity is ready to start all over again with Victoria; Spirit’s just about ready to start moving.SS: Yeah, just started moving today.D: It’s the adventure that just won’t stop?SS: Well its been that way for a thousand, two thousand sols depending on how you look at it. It will stop. It’s gonna stop some day. We don’t know when and so all we can do is you know the attitude that I’ve been trying to take and the whole team’s been trying to take from the very beginning is you know we have an extraordinary opportunity here. Every day is an adventure. It could end at any moment. Just cherish it every single day. Don’t ever take for granted this incredible gift that we’ve got, and lets just push hard and squeeze the most we can out of these vehicles while we got em.D: Steve, thank you very much.SS: Glad to do it.

The only thing that ticks me off about that is that James hasn't open-sourced his program code yet - or even released it! Come on James, I want to see how you generate those amazing natural color renderings. And steal the code.

DE: We'll, it's been just over a year since we last chatted. Have you stopped trying to make predictions about what might happen...

SS: [laughs]

DE: ..or 12 months ago did you think "it would be nice if we could do this, it would be nice if we could do that"? Aspirations of 12 months ago, how do they tie in with today?

SS: I think they tie in pretty well. I think the biggest difference between what we had hoped would be the situation a year ago and what is the situation is that because we've lost the right-front wheel on Spirit, we can't climb anymore. So I had had thoughts about maybe going up McCool Hill, or something like that, or at least going part way up it, and that's not in the cards. Spirit just can't climb anymore. We can do slopes up to 7, 8, 9 degrees, but you need to be able to climb 20 degree slopes for that kind of thing, so that's off the table. But other than that, the plan was, let's go explore Home Plate, let's find a safe place to spend the winter, let's try to get to Victoria Crater. So we always have a long term plan. We've got a long term plan now for both rovers. But what actually happens is always dependent on what Mars throws at you.

DE: Now, in those 12 months, it may seem like Spirit's spent most of them sat at Low Ridge Haven...

SS: Yeah.

DE: ...you've covered a lot of ground since last September, and we worked from the top down. First stop was...

SS: Now, you're going to have to remind me where we were last September, because I think in sol numbers, I don't think in...

DE: We'd just, it was, I guess, late 600s, just got to the summit...

SS: OK, all right...

DE: ...at the summit a couple of weeks...

SS: ...so we're comin' down off the crest of Haskin Ridge.

DE: Indeed.

SS: Yeah, OK.

DE: The first major stop was probably El Dorado

SS: Well, El Dorado, sure. But there was all that Commanche stuff and everything before that. Seminole, Commanche, several others in there. But El Dorado was a big one, yeah.

DE: Did anything stand out once you got there and got the instruments onto it? About what was going on, and why all that dark material <unclear>

SS: I think El Dorado...and El Dorado is not unique. There are other things very similar to it. There's something like that over on Clark Hill, for example. But I think of El Dorado as being basically an aeolean cul-de-sac, a place where the pattern of the winds is such that sand can get in but it can't get out very well. It just has to do with the nature of the prevailing winds and the shape of the topography, and so it provides sort of a local trap for sand grains. Once they get in, it's very hard for them to get out of there.

DE: It was a rapid sprint thereafter...

SS: Yeah, it was.

DE: ...and you had, Paso Robles was a surprise not far from Larry's Lookout...

SS: That's right.

DE: ...and then you hit Tyrone,

SS: Tyrone, yep.

DE: ...and Arad.

SS: Arad, yeah.

DE: Were they telling similar stories...

SS: Similar but not identical. Now I don't know what the composition of the soil is at Tyrone. By the time we got there it was really gettin' tight, I mean it was scary. 'Cause we were trying very hard to get to a safe place to spend the winter. At that point we had said "OK, we're done doing science, just get the rover someplace safe", and then we got stuck, and of course having the right-front wheel not functioning made it even worse. So that was a very tough situation. Arad, we did do a careful investigation of, and it's similar, but not identical to what we found at Paso Robles. It has an enormous amount of ferric sulfate salt, as was the case at Paso Robles, but Paso Robles had a significant quantity of phosphates, and we didn't see that at Arad. So there's something different there. But they're conceptually similar.

DE: Did it surprise you how quickly it went from "free power for everybody" to "quick, let's find a slope, because" ...

SS: No, it's straightforward math. We knew exactly what the current was going to look like, it's easy to predict. We weren't seeing any anomalous rate of buildup of dust on the solar arrays or anything like that, it's just the changing of the seasons. We knew exactly the pace it was going to happen at, we were trying to be someplace safe by about sol 800, and it was a little later than that, but not much. The only thing that really made it sporty was that all of a sudden, we lost that wheel. And that made it a lot more difficult, because we had what looked like some really good places to spend the winter on McCool hill that we were heading for, and then when the wheel went out, all of a sudden our options were very limited. And fortunately Low Ridge was there, and actually we got pretty lucky. Low Ridge turned out to be a pretty good place to spend the winter. Very interesting place, interesting geochemistry, we found two meteorites, it's been a great place. Plus the scenery there is beautiful, it's one of the most striking views we've seen. So we could have done worse.

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